Rites of passage for young people today
Dana Sutherland
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17 February 2021
As children we have this innate curiosity about the lives of the adults around us, wondering what could possibly lay ahead on our own journey.
‘The world is your oyster’, I was frequently told. Having graduated from high school a couple of years ago, I find myself in the middle of this journey. I don’t quite feel ‘grown up’, but I know I’m no longer a child. The truth is, we don’t really know what kind of things make us an adult or even what it feels like until we’ve already done it for ourselves.
Here are some of the moments that were rites of passage for me.
- Landing your first job
Whether it’s smack on the age of 14 at a fast food restaurant or a summer internship after high school. Good. For. You. You’ve made your own money, and you’ve started to learn to balance responsibility with whatever else you’ve got going on in your life. This was a big one for me, and something that I’m glad I did during high school, learning to manage my time efficiently enough to both study and work.
- Getting a licence
Passing the driver’s test will forever be a staple of really feeling like a grown up. Until this point, you’ve been driven exclusively by adults to school, sports practice, friends’ houses, etc. Now you get to decide where and when you go somewhere.
- Your first big purchase
Saving up your hard-earned money, whether or not you have something in mind to spend it on, is a big win. It makes you appreciate how we get the things that have previously been provided for us. It helps us to better understand what we need, what we want and how we should prioritise when we’ll make that big purchase.
- A trip without your family
Choosing a destination, budgeting and planning a journey is a lot of work, but reaps many rewards wherever you choose to go. The sights we get to see in the time we have away helps us to appreciate how much work it took our parents to plan trips not just for themselves, but for their kids to enjoy too. The stress of making your scheduled transport or getting lost in an unfamiliar place helps us to get more comfortable with that oyster of a world around us. We learn a lot about ourselves and the world this way and gives us a delicious taste of the places we’d like to see in the future.
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